I have snapped. The shouting and chaos in my apartment has reached a pitch that grips my spleen and causes my body to shake. The small boy is stomping around in his gumboots, yelling about something that isn’t going precisely right, and the big boy is nagging me about finding him a playdate. My fellow warden (inmate?) has also reached the end of his tether and we’ve started to snap at one another.
Then, at last, there is a breakthrough. The big boy gets word from a friend and leaves on his bike. The small boy goes down for a nap. Before he heads upstairs for his own nap, I ask my husband, “I’m taking a walk, any objections?”
“No, go enjoy yourself. Be free.”
With each step I feel that grip on my insides slacken and find that my lungs hold air again. I am listening to a mixtape - a ninety-song mixtape that I created for someone who isn’t remotely interested in it. But in the end I realise it was for myself all along, to get “intentional” with my own music. So I’m going through it to make sure the order I have selected works on some level that nobody but I will ever appreciate. And it does.
I am letting the music guide me down the beach, up the side of Maungauika, and into the heart of the maunga. I love this place; the network of paths that wind up and down and around, each with their own special element, I am always delighted to be here. I love to sit in the searchlight emplacements and consider each view. I step gingerly down the steep, mossy steps to where a great waka was once hidden. I say a small karakia for those who slumber in a cliffside glen, and wish good luck to those who are alive and fishing below. I go behind a searchlight emplacement to the quiet cave I know exists, where bored teenage debauchery has certainly happened the night before. Around the corner, I see the bits left behind by an unfathomably large submarine net that once stretched across the harbour, back when it was thought anyone would notice New Zealand had joined the world war. That’s not fair - Japan did notice, I learned that at the museum one day, before the tug of a small hand pulled me away from what I was reading.
At this point I’m positively giddy about being out on my own. I’m arriving at my very favourite place on the maunga - a tunnel that comes up from the coastal edge and goes upward, back toward the entrance. It gets very dark for a few seconds before you can see the light at the other end, a warm picture of concete steps bathed in sunlight. For these few seconds you have to address your instinctual fear of being alone in the dark, to trust that it is the same place you have traveled with a torch, and that you are the most frightening thing within.
In the middle of this tunnel you can look up through a shaft, which once had a ladder going 5 or 6 meters up to an opening. I should know more about how this part of the fortifications worked, but really it’s the aesthetics that get me. Off to the side, there’s a gallery that leads to another searchlight emplacement. But on the way there is a magazine. A magazine, for those of you who have not read all the interpretive signboards at your local Russian-scare military fortification, is a place where the ammunition was stored. All that ammo for the guns that were never fired, because to this day some world maps still neglect to include this island nation.
Being invisible is useful sometimes. You can observe at leisure, avoid being pulled into situations you aren’t ready for, perhaps will never be ready for. You can pull strings and make noises, with none of that causality pinging back to you. In that magazine, where it is pitch black, you may as well be invisible. Even better is the u-shaped candle passage that circles behind the magazine, sensibly created to separate the flame from the ballistics. I step slowly through the candle passage, starting out with the light from the phone to ensure there are no other ogres. When I get to the little window that looks in on the magazine, I stop. I take my headphones out, unplug them from the phone, and play “Shame and Scandal” by the Skatalites into the echoing dark. It sounds excellent and I am very pleased.
I wander toward the entrance and notice the bobbing, becapped heads of some visitors to my new lair. Their white tube socks and brand new sneakers suggest they are fresh off the cruise ship. How they walked all the way here is a small miracle, but here they are and it is time to act.
I scamper (for real) back to my candle passage and cue up the last two minutes of Pink Floyd’s “I’ve got a bike,” as it’s the weirdest thing I have, and turn the phone as loud as I can. Clanging and clocks and eventually quacking will bounce off the concrete walls and down the hall. I hear a searingly American voice declare, “Oh I just don’t know about this Bob. What’s that sound?”
“Naw, it’s okay. It’s just a little dark is all. C’mon.”
“But do you hear that? It’s a helluvalot creepier than the last one.”
“You’re hearing things Barb.”
“I am not hearing things! Yer deaf! Why didn’t we do that nice bus tour to Hobbiton?”
“Well yer dumb, and I’m not gonna do another goddamned high tea! We’re doing my thing here, the military history. Now hush and let’s just get t’ the other side.”
I hear them clomp down the hallway, and I peer around the corner to watch them appear at the opening to the side passage, I duck my head away just in time as Bob starts walking down the passage.
“Wish they sold flashlights here. What in the hell-” The quacking part has started and I hear the man’s footsteps recede rapidly. I imagine he’d done an about face and stifle a giggle. “Let’s just keep going.”
“I told you, there’s someone in here gonna kill us!”
“Stay calm and just walk.”
“Which way was out again?”
“Shit, I dunno, just go back out that way.”
At that point I let out a howl, and the visitors evaporate. I run to the searchlight emplacement and watch them run back down the track. I do a little dance of jubilation at my coup. This is my palace of fear and chaos. The darkness is mine.
It’s a while before more visitors come. Some I allow to pass with a vague sense of foreboding. Another couple break into a run when they see the light. Then I hear something that causes my face to twitch. It’s a recording of a laser gun, the kind you hear on those noisy toys you don’t buy your kids, but some obnoxious relative thinks is a lark to present to them. Then come the screeches of childish glee. As though splashed with holy water, I recoil and dash into the candle passage. The music is still going full blast, but my fingers can’t even open my lockscreen. And at that point a Lords of Acid song I didn’t even realize was on my phone comes on, blasting something rude about lady parts.
I hope they don’t come this way. I don’t really want to use my newfound powers to traumatize children. I hear their parents calling them, “Jayton, Pinxton, come back please!” All of a sudden my shrouds come off, and I’m just a person again, somebody’s mum, a gainfully employed, responsible person who attends committee meetings and pays taxes. I see some lights flash. Shit, of course they have torches! This is going to be so awkward.
I’m crouched against the far end of the candle passage, stealing nervous glances out at the hallway. The problem with families is they don’t travel in a clump, they spread out like a train. So although Jayton has entered the candle passage with his trusty light, Plixton, mum, and dad are straggling in the hall. I am trapped, in seconds junior is going to have me in his sights.
I am flushed out like a pheasant at a game park. I startle the dad as I run for the searchlight emplacement, but he is quickly running after me. I have a pretty good headstart though and my adrenalin launches me over the low concrete wall and down the hill to the track below. I run toward a low-tide walkway and vanish along the side of a cliff. Pretty slick, I suppose, but still the spell is broken.
I walk home, wondering what just happened to me, why I had made such a strange string of decisions. As the gable peak of my flat comes into view, I get a message from my husband. “Are you ever coming back?”
“Yes, nearly there”
My husband is on the couch when I return, staring into his laptop. “How was your walk? You were out a while.”
“Yeah, It was alright. I went to North Head.”
“Oh, really? There’s been a thing over there on the Locals Facebook. Apparently there’s a child predator hanging out in the tunnels, playing nasty music to kids.”
“Huh, that’s wierd. Didn’t see any of that.”
Loading comments...